Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews has been one of the more outspoken players during the lockout and didn't hold back when asked about the NHL releasing its entire offer online.

He told Chris Kuc of the Chicago Tribune, "They're trying to sway public opinion, and I don't think that's a secret. There's no coincidence that they've been so quiet and all of a sudden they come out ... talking about the season starting Nov. 2. They're playing an angle there."

Kelly Hrudey, the ex-NHL goalie and current CBC analyst had a similar view. "It's like you're poking players in the eye," he said during a radio show, as the Toronto Sun's Lance Hornby wrote. "Couldn't [Gary Bettman] have waited a day? Let the players get back to them first."

No one should be surprised it happened in the first place. That's what the National Post's Cam Cole said, but he also made another point. "If [Donald] Fehr wants to talk about a real betrayal of the process, he should be taking 50 percent of the responsibility for doing nothing for two months, resulting in Bettman’s phony deadline for finalizing the new CBA -- getting the fans’ hopes up for a Nov. 2 season start -- as if the world could not possibly cope with anything less than a full 82 games," he said. "Guess what, gents: most of the world -- at least, those paying for tickets, not being paid by the game -- would vote for a significantly smaller number."

By this afternoon, the NHL's publicized offer will likely be ancient history after the two sides meet in Toronto, with a counter-proposal potentially coming from the union. If these are the comments after just a few days of true negotiations, just imagine what will be said in the coming days and weeks.

In other lockout news:

The Star-Ledger's Rich Chere spoke to Johan Hedberg and Dainius Zubrus of the Devils and got their reaction to the NHL's offer. Like other players, they didn't agree with the entire proposal. "From what I understand, there is so much more than the 50-50 number to what actual HRR is," Zubrus told Chere. "But either way you look at it, it's still quite a big reduction in our salaries and everything else."

Adam Gretz of CBSSports.com focused on one key part of the owners' proposal. The league would actually punish teams that signed players like Ilya Kovalchuk and Mike Richards to front-loaded deals that were longer than five years. "If either [a player] were to retire before their contract expires, the salary cap hit would still be on the books, according to this latest proposal," Gretz wrote. "But it wouldn't belong to the Los Angeles Kings (or whatever team they were playing for at that time). The cap hit would instead fall back on the Flyers as they were the team that signed them to those contracts."